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Old 10-31-2012, 08:22 AM   #50
Cliff Judge
Location: Kawasaki, Kanagawa
Join Date: Sep 2005
Posts: 1,276
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Re: Ueshiba the monomaniac?

Quote:
Christopher Li wrote: View Post
I think that you'd need to speak to Dan again about that.
I was, in fact, before you responded on his behalf.

Quote:
Christopher Li wrote: View Post
In any case, that those folks trained for "martial power" to the exclusion of many other things is hard to dispute. Are you really arguing that this was not the case?
I am arguing for the possibility that this is a very myopic view of what these men were after, in the case of Kodo, Sagawa, and Takeda, about which we know comparatively little.

That Taichi guy...who didn't build a house for his family because it would cut into his training time...that's a powerful cautionary image but I don't think it is the proper cookie cutter for the four aiki greats we are discussing.

In the case of Ueshiba, "martial power" was clearly a trivial matter to him in his latter decades. His focus was spiritual. And going back further, what is your explanation for the whole Omoto involvement? Why go to Mongolia? Why get involved in politics? The huge investment in personal time and energy he put into these things, at the expense of training his internal power, really indicates that the martial power aspect was a minor piece of the puzzle.

I would go so far as to say that a solo training / internal power training method cognate to what Ueshiba was doing, followed simply for the benefit of pushing oneself off of walls and avoiding joint-locks and such, is a far more degenerate version of what Ueshiba was doing than Aikikai Aikido.
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